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Featured Artists

Each issue of Southwest Art magazine features in-depth profiles of top artists in the West and beyond. Browse this section to read interesting and compelling stories about artists’ lives and their techniques, artistic styles, and sources of inspiration. Each article is accompanied by plenty of images to show examples of the artists’ works—including sculpture and paintings in oil, pastel, watercolor, and acrylic, and featuring subjects from western landscapes to cityscapes, figures, wildlife and animal art, still lifes, and more.

Chong has participated in plein-air painting events around the country, enormously expanding her experience of this part of the world and its cultures and people, all while having fun, selling paintings, and winning awards.

While Pugh generally keeps a “blank mind” when sketching and photographing, allowing himself to be drawn intuitively and viscerally to certain scenes, once back in the studio he often discovers recurring themes—which overwhelmingly relate to family and home.

In addition to featuring color and light, Aagard’s paintings demonstrate his penchant for creating rich, lush textures. He works almost exclusively with a palette knife, wielding the tool to apply, layer, and push paint around the canvas.

For Chidester, color is a fascinating aspect of art. When depicting objects whose colors have faded with time, she often bumps up the saturation to give them life, but not so much as to lose their sense of age and wear.

Featured Artists

These days, the seasoned artist draws and paints for the sake of exploration, of testing solutions to a visual problem until he finds resolution in the various shapes and hues that populate his experiments.